Simply Sing

            On the final night of Chanukah, during the communal candle lighting ceremony on Zoom, my rabbi asked us to think about what light we might want to bring into the New Year, and I already had an answer: I want to sing more. I tend to sing alone in my car at this point, but he didn’t specify that the light had to be for other people.

I’ve been thinking about singing more since choir practices over the summer, when I noticed that I was struggling to make it through each session, always running out of air too soon. But I couldn’t figure out how to make myself sing more, when there were so many reasons why I didn’t feel comfortable doing it. And then I started bingeing Glee videos on YouTube, which led the algorithm to send me all kinds of videos about singing, and somewhere along the way I saw an ad for an app called Simply Sing, offering me a one-week free trial, and I decided to try it. To be honest, I expected it to be a dud, but I hoped that it would at least encourage me to sing a little bit each day and start to build a habit.

I hid in my bedroom and took the fan out of my window for my first practice, just in case someone could hear me. The first thing the app wanted me to do was to find my vocal range. They told me to hum my lowest note, and read something in my regular speaking voice, and shout to get someone’s attention, and once the math was done the app had decided that I was, of course, an alto, which felt judgy. Back when I took voice lessons in college, my teacher told me that I’m a mezzo soprano, with an extension, but that was after a lot of practice, and this was after a couple of shouts and buzzes, so I tried not to feel like I’d fallen too far behind.

            The next task was to try a warm up: two minutes of singing the same short phrase over and over, gradually going a step higher each time. It was actually fun, and the female voice telling me what to do was encouraging, so I kept going. She told me to choose a song to learn, and sent me to a list of recommended songs. There were locks next to all of the songs that were above the Basic or Easy levels, but there were still plenty to choose from. I think I started with Every Breath You Take (the Police), or Give Me One Reason (Tracy Chapman), songs that were already familiar. The next thing the app told me to do was to sing the lowest and highest parts of the song, to see if they fit comfortably in my range or needed to be adjusted up or down. I earned points for finding the right key for each song, and then I earned points for reading the lyrics out loud, which was much more embarrassing than I expected it would be; maybe because lyrics rely heavily on their music to make them make sense.

Then it was time to learn the whole song, except, they didn’t show me the music, or break the song into manageable pieces, or coach me through it, they just had a vocal track playing, and the lyrics placed higher and lower on the screen to show their relative pitch. I could go over each song a hundred times if I wanted to, and change the key each time, but I could only earn points for one run-through, and one attempt at singing the song on my own with the vocal track muted. It felt kind of like doing Karaoke, and it bothered me that I didn’t earn more points for practicing more, and it bothered me that I couldn’t see the actual notes (so I could go and play them on a keyboard, at my own pace). The app did grade me on how closely I matched the notes and the rhythm of the song, though, which was something. And the collection of songs was good enough, especially as I earned more points and opened the locks next to more and more of the songs.

            I wasn’t learning everything I wanted to learn, but I was practicing at least thirty minutes a day, much more than I would have done on my own, so I decided to sign up for a one-month subscription after the free trial ended. The gamification of the app meant that as I earned more points, I could access new lessons: singing in chest voice, and singing in head voice, correct breathing technique, and pacing, etc. Too quickly, though, I ran out of new lessons to earn with my points, and I finished opening all of the locked songs, and the app stopped counting my points altogether, meaning that the gamification part of the experience was mostly over.

But I still had a new warm up each day, and plenty of songs left to learn, and each day that I was able to get a practice done felt like an accomplishment. I kept putting more and more songs on my wishlist for the future: More Than a Feeling (Boston), The Story (Brandi Carlile), Defying Gravity (from Wicked). I was still closing my bedroom door, and taking my fan out of the window for every session, and I was noticing all kinds of problems with my voice that I couldn’t name, or ignore, but I tried to remind myself that the goal wasn’t to become a professional singer, just to enjoy singing again.

            In the meantime, I was still bingeing Glee videos on YouTube, hoping to be inspired by the fun they seemed to be having as they sang together, and trying not to compare myself to them, if at all possible. And then my Glee binge extended to watching Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff in Spring Awakening, and then Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsey Mendez in Merrily We Roll Along, and then all of the Glee kids who’d ended up on Broadway (like Darren Criss and Alex Newell and Kevin McHale), not to mention the Broadway stars who had guest starred on Glee (like Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth) and then just Broadway stars in general, like Aaron Tveit and  Gavin Creel and Bernadette Peters and Christian Borle and Audra McDonald and on and on and on.

I worried that obsessively listening to amazing singers was going to discourage me too much, but I was still practicing every day, and each day when I opened the app, it made sure to tell me more of the benefits of singing: it raises your endorphins! It improves respiration and circulation! It encourages you to express yourself! It encourages you to sing with other people (fat chance)!

Of course, my old issues kept bubbling up: the competition theme (you need to be the best singer in the world in order to have the right to sing at all); the expert theme (you need to master sight reading and dynamics and vocal placement in order to even begin to practice effectively); the alienation theme (if you don’t fit in with other singers – and I was watching a lot of interviews of performers that made it clear I would not have been their cup of tea – then you have no right to sing); and, the waste of time theme (spending time on this, or anything else, with no hope of earning a living from it, is selfish and stupid).

My brain was swirling with noise, and I couldn’t figure out how to drown it out, but at the same time I was noticing that singing certain songs felt cathartic, even therapeutic, either because the words of the song expressed something I needed to say, or needed to hear, or because the music tapped into places in my voice that I couldn’t find on my own. Singing Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay with Otis Redding, felt like singing with a friend who really knew me. And I thought about an interview I’d seen with Jonathan Groff, where he said that a lot of the roles he’s played have been like therapy for him, helping him work through something that he wasn’t able to work out on his own.

But I was getting more and more frustrated by the limitations of the app, wishing there were more steps in the learning process for each song, and then more steps to help me figure out how to deal with all of the noise in my head. And I knew that I wasn’t ready to seek out live human beings for help, so I went to the app store to see if there might be other singing apps that could offer more support. So far, none of the ones I’ve found has been as good for me as Simply Sing, but I’ll keep looking. And there are always YouTube videos to teach me more breathing exercises and vocal warm ups and vocal techniques. And now I’m seeing ads from all kinds of voice teachers who specialize in posture or mixing chest voice with head voice, or building breath capacity; all things I want to work on, eventually.

These are all tentative steps, but I’m reminding myself that that’s how I started with Hebrew too, and with teaching and writing and therapy. All of the best things, for me, seem to be made of a long series of small, tentative steps, usually without having any idea where those steps will lead. So, I’m doing my best to take it one practice at a time, and I’m looking forward to finding out where these small steps might lead me.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?